Vulnerability and Power

“The Power of Religion/Religion and Power” was the theme of the annual conference of the European Academy of Religion in Bologna (Italy) in June 2020. The keynote lectures focused on issues of political and cultural power, religious conflict, and the possible positive impact of religion on individuals and societies. As theologians engaged with disability-issues, Petre Maican and Talitha Cooreman-Guittin felt that this narrow vision of power deserved to be approached by way of a surprising theme: vulnerability.

The term ‘vulnerability’ came to the fore in moral philosophy in the 1990s, through the works of highly influential philosophers such as Eva Kittay, Marta Nussbaum or Alisdair MacIntyre. For them, vulnerability was meant to emphasize that human beings are fundamentally precarious and dependent creatures who desperately need each other in order to exist and flourish. The term entered the main stream of the contemporary disability-theology discourse with Tom Reynolds’ work (Reynolds, 2008) rapidly spreading into the work of other theologians who see the intrinsic vulnerability of creation as a marker of our common humanity. While Petre and Talitha did not question the innate vulnerability of human life, they were soon to realize that for each of them vulnerability meant something very different. Petre saw vulnerability as a situation at the margins of society, constantly under threat, where one learns to live constantly fearing for oneself and for one’s loved ones; Talitha saw vulnerability not necessarily as a weakness, but as a surprising manifestation of God’s power and God’s presence among all. The stark divergence of their views reflects the dissonant understandings of vulnerability that characterize much of the literature on the subject. As popular as the notion of vulnerability has become, it was becoming clearer that a semantic void nevertheless surrounds it.

Still, as complex issues can never be resolved in solitude by one person, but only together by a community of learners, the two editors decided to take their opposite views on vulnerability to the Bologna-conference, organizing a panel asking how vulnerability questions theology in an effort of reappraising power and weakness. As with so many conferences, COVID-19 disrupted this attempt to have personal and direct peer engagement. Instead, they invited the contributors to share their views in an article. They were surprised to see the great diversity of their approaches, each understanding the link between vulnerability and power in relation to different frameworks, such as those provided by management models, artificial intelligence, care-situations, consent, or spirituality. It is these contrasting perceptions of vulnerability that are brought to the fore in this issue of the JDR.

As editors of this special issue, we are grateful to the editors of the JDR to have provided a venue for six of the would-be conference papers in this Special Issue entitled “Vulnerability and Power”.

Talitha would like to end this introduction with a tribute to Jean-Christophe Parisot de Bayard, French author, theologian, and the only quadriplegic senior civil servant in France, who died in October 2020, and who wrote the following words reflecting on vulnerability:

“Is it an asset or a prison, the antechamber of death or the dawn of life? The great human adventure is still in its infancy, and if human beings have survived so many cataclysms over millions of years, it is not because they are so powerful, but because they know how to adapt and be in solidarity with the most vulnerable.” (Cooreman-Guittin & Thiel, 2020, p. 253).

It is this puzzling coexistence of vulnerability and power that is at the heart of this issue of the JDR.

The first two articles aim to develop the initial positions of the editors’ conversations and explain what was at stake behind them. In the first article, Talitha Cooreman-Guitin provides a robust defence of the view that vulnerability is inherent to human nature and represents our path toward communion with God. Talitha’s article is informed by her research on Alzheimer and ageing, where most people would have difficulties accepting others to care for them. To counter this view, she begins by arguing that human beings are created dependent on their Creator and interdependent of the entire creation. The act of footwashing, described in John 13:1–17, becomes in this way paradigmatic for human life. It defines a graced state of existence where to allow oneself to be taken care of in order to have part with God.

Petre Maican has a different starting point, namely poverty and marginalization. If Cooreman-Guitin speaks for persons who seem to have had a stable social status throughout their lives, Maican speaks about those who found themselves in vulnerable situations, at the margins of society and power. His aim is to question the facility with which vulnerability is often proposed as a cure for human selfishness. If anything, Maican argues, feeling vulnerable tends to make us even more selfish and ruthless. Only someone who already has a very strong ethical commitment can live his or her own vulnerability in a way that shows solidarity and compassion. To illustrate this point, Maican refers to a novel based on real life events, written by Savatie Baștovoi and on the life and work of Mother Maria Skobtsova, canonized in the Orthodox Church for her martyrdom in a Nazi concentration camp.

Marial Corona-Téllez uncovers another facet of the relationship between vulnerability and power, namely that of vulnerability as locus for spiritual perfection and Christian leadership. For Corona-Téllez, John Henry Newman represents the most adequate example of this definition. Newman’s life was full of ups and downs because he always risked failure and being excluded from the circle of power. The scandal Newman stirred up with the publication of his essay “On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine” was an assumed failure that would see him marginalized by the hierarchy of the time. The recent canonization of John Henry Newman and the insistence of certain strands of disability theology that human perfection should be read in relation to limits and vulnerabilities make the author conclude that assuming the possibility of failing and being hurt is one way to Christian holiness.

Axel Liégeois examines the relationship between vulnerability and power through the lenses of consent. He remarks that persons with intellectual disabilities are often included in spiritual practices to which they did not assent directly, such as participating in the liturgy, catechesis or receiving the sacraments. Aware that seeking the consent of persons with intellectual disabilities is not always an easy thing to do, Liégeois proposes to discern the agreement or disagreement of persons with intellectual disabilities to certain spiritual practices, through what he calls “inferred consent”. Inferred consent presupposes the commitment of the spiritual companions toward empowering the person with intellectual disabilities to be responsible for her spiritual life by allowing her the space to express her agreement or disagreement about the proposed practices – and when the agreement or the disagreement is not evident to pay attention to verbal and non-verbal cues.

The article of Kabira Massota provides a spiritual interpretation of vulnerability coming from the Islamic Sufi tradition. After clarifying that the language of disability lacks in the Qur’an and that physical disability is often presented as a social construct, she moves to speak about the universal “spiritual deficiency” that each human being has to overcome in order to return to God and fulfill her meaning in the world. For the Sufi tradition, on which Massota’s argument is grounded, the path to God is none other than that of vulnerability. Anyone who might wish to get near God has to assume a vulnerable condition, where she is putting one’s entire life into God’s hands, with full and accepting confidence in God’s will.

Marius Dorobanțu thinks about vulnerability in the framework of the new developments taking place in the field of artificial intelligence. At the heart of Dorobanțu’s paper lies the concern for human distinctiveness. Not so long-ago humans affirmed confidently that they are created in the image of God because they are endowed with rationality. The advancements in the field of artificial intelligence make such a claim sound hollow nowadays. To preserve human distinctiveness Dorobanțu opts for a move that is all too familiar in disability theology, namely to speak about vulnerability as the fundamental human feature. For Dorobanțu, vulnerability is the term that summarizes human relationality in its empathic, meek and forgiving character, something that artificial intelligence could neither experience nor understand.

The articles gathered in this issue do not give a unanimous definition of vulnerability, but what is remarkable about them is that they uncover the main difficulty confronting us when speaking about vulnerability, the multitude of situations where vulnerability is a key concept: in the attempt to preserve our distinctiveness as creatures in the image of God, in the understanding that we are not self-sufficient beings who can live outside a community of care, or even as a reminder that we live in a fallen world, where the acceptance of our own vulnerability comes under threat from the structures of shame and sin. Of course, many other situations could be added here, and it is a conversation that clearly deserves to be continued.

Talitha [email protected]
Petre [email protected]

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.